Toronto-Dominion Bank has begun rolling out software to some members of its financial crimes and risk management team that will monitor how staff spend time on browsers, chats and meetings. The move aims to lift visibility lost to hybrid work, but it has sparked privacy and consent questions among employees. This piece looks at what the tool tracks, the bank’s defence, and how staff pushed back on the change.
TD told affected teams the monitoring program tracks time spent in browsers, internal chat and meeting applications, and that the intention is to recover clarity around daily workflows. That sounds practical, but even practical measures feel invasive when they follow people from home to the office. Companies across finance and tech are facing similar resistance as they try to measure productivity more precisely.
TD framed the rollout as a common industry practice and stressed safeguards exist to protect privacy. The bank said, “In various parts of our business, we use automated solutions to improve insights and better allocate resources,” and added, “This is not AI and not specific to any business or matter, the tool allows managers to more accurately manage workflows, team capacity and performance. Where deployed, colleagues are informed about where they are used and for what purpose.” Those reassurances meet skepticism from workers who worry about how data might be used.
The software vendor ActiveOps describes WorkiQ as a tool for “employee and wellbeing intelligence” and TD said the tool will run in the background while having gone through a privacy review. On a team call, TD’s associate vice president of high-risk investigations explained the goal: “The idea is it’s going to show pain points, where do we spend too much time … We know we have a lot of pain points across our systems,” which frames monitoring as diagnosis rather than discipline.
Managers clarified the product won’t listen to meetings, but will indicate whether a colleague is active during a call, and it will register that someone is using Excel without capturing their actual spreadsheet content. “It is running in the background and it did go through privacy review,” Pacitti said in response to staff concerns, adding that the tool will register activity without recording conversations or the substance of documents.
INTERNET DURING LUNCH? became a shorthand for the thornier questions staff asked after the announcement, with a follow-up document addressing specific scenarios. TD’s FAQ asked and answered common points including “Can I use the Internet during my lunch hour?” and “How much time is a colleague expected to have accounted for during the day?” The bank said there will be an allowance of some unaccounted-for time and that managers are working to set sensible expectations.
Employees pressed on consent, data use and whether the system would fuel performance reviews, pointing out a paradox: resources devoted to monitoring might be better spent automating tedious manual tasks. One staffer urged the bank to invest in the fixes that would reduce the pain points the software is supposed to reveal. “I totally agree with you. We have way too much manual stuff,” Pacitti said. “We’re spending way too much time on that manual effort. I can only hope that this will further prove that point.”
TD’s compliance unit has grown after the bank paid heavy fines related to money-laundering controls, and the drive to tighten oversight comes against that backdrop. Most employees remain on hybrid schedules, which makes managers keen to regain visibility they say was lost after remote work became widespread. Still, restoring oversight without eroding trust is proving to be a delicate line to walk for institutions trying to balance risk, productivity and employee morale.
